She might not have been sitting on the banks of the Todd River, which winds its dry, sandy way through the red centre, but Darry Fraser was absolutely in the town called Alice in 1983 when she wrote her first novel.
Based on the Murray River.
As you do.
And no sooner had she written ‘the end’ than she thought her budding career as an author was about to sink without trace.
“In October that year the Seven network released All The Rivers Run – Sigrid Thornton and John Waters were living my book on the screen, it was a smash hit and I quite simply lost my nerve and gave up,” Fraser recalls.
“I stumbled on for a little while, won a couple of small, short story competitions but it all started to fade,” she says.
“So to keep food on the table I had to turn my hand to other things, and that included working in the hospitality industry and even running a 4WD tour company across the country.
“But no matter how far I drove, I could not get away from my desire to be a writer. Back in 1983 I thought I had written the greatest thing since sliced bread, so in the 2000s I started to think it was probably still as good.”
Fraser says she suddenly started to realise there was more of her life behind her than in front, so if she was ever going to do anything about writing, she “had better get on with it”.
So she dusted off the old manuscript, which had been lovingly and endlessly reworked, and pitched to HarperCollins. The rest is a story that would be worth, well, worth a book. Or a TV series.
The prestigious label signed her, Daughter of the Murray was published in 2016, and today, nine novels down the track, she is a fulltime author.
With the Murray almost always flowing through her stories as a central theme, a love affair which began when she was an eight-year-old and her family moved to Swan Hill.
“My early years, growing up in Melbourne, weren’t terribly exciting, but once we moved to the Murray at Swan Hill my creativity soared – in my head anyway,” Fraser chuckles.
“But stories of the river have been with me since,” she says.
“I love the whole thing about those early years along the Murray, the trade, opening up the inland, taking products down the river to the port at Adelaide and carving a new world in the bush – but with the population pinned to the Murray, and the other rivers, for generations.
“I love my writing, I love the period about which I write (HarperCollins call her work historical and adventure drama, Fraser calls it empowering feminist adventure) and I really love the research.
“You would think history, which has happened, would be a set subject, but history keeps evolving and I like to think when I include a historical fact, that’s exactly what it is,” she added.
Fraser says she can’t be sure when history began to make her sit up and take notice, she reckons it’s always been there as has mystery and adventure.
And being drawn to those things made for an easy segue into the style and genre of the stories she now writes.
Even though she does write other genres, and will continue to do that, she knows in her heart of hearts she works best in the historic drama space, and, as she always says, “love the research”.
The publisher puff for her newest title shows Fraser has gone back to her favourite space: Trouble with the law, a missing sister, and a vengeful ex-paramour, Evie Emerson has a dangerous path ahead of her.
With two old friends, Raff Dolan and Fitz O’Shea, and struggling with old secrets between them, they navigate their way through police corruption, intimidation and threats to discover the truth.
US historical fiction author Edgar Lawrence Doctorow, who died in 2015, the year HarperCollins signed Fraser, perhaps summed up her work in one, short sentence: “The historian will tell you what happened; the novelist will tell you what it felt like.”
Author visit
Let bestselling Australian author Darry Fraser take you back to life along the Murray and colonial Australia on the eve of Federation when she visits Echuca Library at 2pm on Wednesday, December 6. This month, Darry had her ninth novel in seven years published and that is much of what she will be talking about.